|
|
|
|
|
|
by stolen_biscuit
624 days ago
|
|
|
> I'm curious to know if "newly discovered" species existed 20 years ago and were actually just discovered, That's exactly it, these wasps existed previously and were just discovered to be distinct from other wasps. Speciation tends to take a very long time (on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of years) or much shorter if there's a strong enough pressure (e.g. something drastically alters an ecosystem and opens up a lot of new niches for a species to radiate into) but still on the order of tens of thousands of years, see [1] for a great example. This of course depends on generation time (evolution only happens to populations, not individuals), so we see quite rapid evolution in things with short generation times like bacteria. For invetebrates like small wasps like this one, it's typically taking the time to sit down and actually identifying them, some species are quite cryptic and it's only obscure or small morphological features that can be used to separate them by eye, and requires genetic analysis to compare and confirm that it's a new species. > Examining old hosts that have died and been preserved and seeing if the 'new species' exists there maybe? I have an entomologist friend and yes, that does happen. There are probably countless new species that have specimens in museums and universities right now that just haven't been properly analysed 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-extraordinary... |
|
|